ENCINO, Calif-On a recent day in this Los Angeles suburb, Maya Jagdeesh, 35, was being wheeled out of a room at the Fertility Institutes after undergoing an $18,000 procedure to ensure she gets a boy.

Jagdeesh (not her real name) had flown in from Vancouver, B.C., with her husband to Dr. Jeffrey Steinberg's clinic after seeing his online ad that characterizes his pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) service as "the world's largest and most successful 100 percent sex-selection program."

Jagdeesh said that in her Indian community, most people would assume that her husband or in-laws had forced her to have the procedure. But she insisted she had sought out the clinic herself.

"I know in our culture it's good to have a boy," she said. With two "lovely daughters" ages 12 and 8, she felt having a son would "complete" her family.

"That's the word I hear … from 98 percent of my patients," Steinberg said. "They want to 'complete' their family."

PGD is a combination of in vitro fertilization and genetic screening developed in the early 1990s to identify embryos...

TORONTO — Women who become pregnant using fertility treatments — particularly in-vitro fertilization — have a slightly higher risk of severe complications around the time of delivery compared to women who conceive naturally, research suggests.

He Jiankui, the Chinese researcher who claimed to have edited the genomes of twin baby girls in a heritable way—and earned widespread condemnation for conducting a risky procedure with little potential benefit—deliberately sidestepped regulations, dodged oversight, and used fake ethical...